by D. Zhonzinsky From the Summer 2017 issue of Jewish Currents IN A CANDY STORE in Brownsville on the corner of Saratoga and Livonia Avenues in 1938 (it could’ve been ’37, probably not ’39), my father placed a bet on a doubleheader being played at Ebbets Field the same day. Seventy-five bucks on each game, […]

by Bennett Muraskin THINK OF the greatest strikes in U.S. labor history and, apart from the garment workers strikes in New York and Chicago before World War I, none come to mind in which Jews played a major role. The railroad workers strike in 1877, the strike for the eight-hour day in 1886, the Homestead […]

by Esther Cohen Some stories we can’t tell enough. March 25, 1911 (honoring this story today) 146 people died, jumping falling factory on 23-29 Washington Place NYU now owners locked the doors preventing workers from taking breaks stealing merchandise Fire changed our laws, starting International Ladies Garment Workers (ILGWU) there are still fires still people […]

Woody Gelman, co-creator of Bazooka Joe for Bazooka Bubble Gum, the Mars Attacks card series of 1962, and numerous other cartoons, comics, and other collectibles, died at 62 on this date in 1978. Gelman was a Brooklyn boy who attended City College, Cooper Union, and Pratt Institute, then worked with Max Fleischer’s studio, DC comics, […]

Cleveland’s Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, a key player in the mobilization of Zionism in America, was born in present-day Lithuania on this date in 1893. He came to the U.S. at 9 and was educated in New York, which he left after high school to attend the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. Graduating as valedictorian, […]

by Henry Foner PEOPLE WHO KNOW something about the political and academic careers of the Foner family would probably assume that I, as the youngest of four brothers, grew up in a household steeped in history and social activism. They couldn’t be further from the truth. My upbringing in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn took […]

The governor of Colorado (Davis H. Waite) dispatched the state militia on this date in 1894 to protect striking workers at the Cripple Creek gold mine — the only instance in American history in which soldiers were mobilized not as strikebreakers but to protect strikers against a private corporate militia. Cripple Creek was a thriving […]

Labor leader Sidney Hillman, head of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and a key organizer of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), died of a heart attack at 59 on this date in 1946. Hillman was born in Lithuania and groomed to be a rabbi, but became a Jewish Bundist by age 16 and, after coming […]

Sol Stetin, the president of the Textile Workers Union of America who led a 17-year struggle to unionize J.P. Stevens in the anti-union American South, was born in Poland, near Lodz, on this date in 1910. As a textile worker, he was active in the nationwide American textile strike of 1934, which involved half a […]

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